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How Instagram killed Firegram

Remember this? Cuckoo for Instagram likes? Then download firegram, right now at Techcrunch? That was the rolling start of a good idea™ designed to solve one wee problem Instagram had. As people maxed out their hashtags, searching "sunset" brought you thousands of sunsets but also junk that had no sun at all in the image, making searching tags ever more useless. Why are people tagging so much? To get likes. And on night it dawned on iAdam that if he made an app that people could only choose one tag for the photo, but then blast it, making the image end up in the top 150 in searches for that tag.. attention-seekers will get their fame and people looking for sunsets will get that. Awesome!

Three weeks later, we were good to go. The PR was ready, the app cleared on Apple and we were waiting for the launch day on TechCrunch. A day before the launch, we opened the app to the public just to feel the “breeze”. A warm and gentle breeze of 500 downloads welcomed us. We were killing time waiting for the launch hour on TC and when it finally arrived, we were hyped. The app flew through the roof. The review were fantastic and the hits grew by the minute, for about…30 minutes when Instagram decided to close our API.

“Oh no, it’s the Nothing”, said the rockbiter.

That’s exactly how I felt at that moment. “The Nothing” hit us so hard, that all we were left to do was to read the pilling comments on TC, laughing at us that the API was closed so fast. “How can it be?” one of my co-founders looked at me leaving me staring at the screen with no words.

We wrote Mike. no reply received.
We wrote him again after an hour. No reply received.
We wrote him everyday for 3 weeks and no, no reply received.
We’ve commented on his Instagram photos just a second after
he replied to one of his followers. No reply back.

Meanwhile I wonder, why is it that the companies built on sharing everything, like Twitter and Instagram, who open up their API's allowing third party apps to build on their infrastructure are so keen on not sharing the data with certain third parties as soon as they seem to do well. Is this a case of do as I say, not as I do?